Tourists threaten Il Postino beach

It is 13 years since Michael Radford made Il Postino. But he has never returned to the island off Sicily where some of the movie's most poignant scenes were filmed, on a beach below a cliff.

"I never go back to the places where I have made a film", he was quoted as telling the Italian daily La Repubblica yesterday. "On principle, and for fear of being disappointed."

Doubtless, were the British director to journey back now to Pollara beach on the island of Salina, he would be profoundly disillusioned - and perhaps regretful - for the beach has all but disappeared, a victim in large part of the movie's extraordinary popularity.

When Il Postino was shot, it was a 10-metre band of grey sand and white pebbles stretching down to the Mediterranean. Today, it is a tiny strip of four metres, dwarfed by the huge cliff - known as Il Costone - which looms over it.

One reason why the beach has shrunk is that each summer the sand in the bay it forms is churned up by motor boats. The mayor of the nearby town of Malfa, Virgilio Ciampi, said the coast guard had issued orders forbidding pleasure craft to come within 150 metres of the shore. "But they have always been ignored, and we are paying the consequences".

The other factor was straightforward vandalism. "We have shown, with a series of photos, that many tourists, before leaving Salina, take home as souvenirs sacks of sand and pebbles taken from the spot without anyone stepping in", said Mr Ciampi.

Il Postino was nominated for five Oscars and for several years was the highest grossing film ever made in a language other than in English. It was loosely based on the Chilean novel El cartero de Neruda by Antonio Skármeta which, like the original, wove fiction around a real event.

The movie departed from the fact that, in 1952, the exiled Marxist poet Pablo Neruda, lived for a spell on Capri. In the film, parts of which were also filmed on the island of Procida off Naples, the poet befriends a postman and helps him to write the love letters that win the heart of a local beauty.

The movie ends with Neruda returning to find that the postman, for whom he was an idol, had become a militant Communist and died in an anti-government demonstration.

What made a touching film yet more affecting was that many of those who saw it knew that its star, 41-year-old Massimo Troisi was dead by the time it was screened. He suffered a heart attack and a day after filming his last scene.

In one of his exchanges with the great writer, Troisi's postman asks how to become a poet. Neruda's reply is: "Try to walk along the shore, as far as the bay, and look around you."